Dr. Eliza Middleton
speaker
104 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 24 Jun
Dr. Eliza Middleton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And that's a signature of experience, not of a mechanism.
But we used to make the same kind of argument about fish, that they couldn't feel because they lacked a neocortex.
But fish don't need a neocortex.
They have their own neural architecture that does the same job.
And I think it's really about what is the question that we're asking?
It isn't, do they feel pain the same as us?
Because they definitely don't.
They don't have the same architecture as we do.
But that doesn't mean that that experience is absent.
The diptera, the flies, and the bladder day, which are the cockroaches, they satisfy six of the eight criteria of pain.
Bees and wasps and also ants satisfy four.
What about orthoptera, which includes crickets?
They also satisfy four.
So I think it's clear that we're just getting more and more evidence that
maybe we were wrong.
Maybe they do feel things.
Maybe they do have a subjective experience.
Yeah, well, I think this is also a really interesting and worthwhile thing to talk about because I think it's very clear that the history of animal welfare and animal welfare law is really a history of a line being drawn and then moved and then another boundary and then we move it again.
And so with the octopuses and the squids, the research around them to support that decision was less systematic evidence than what we have now for insects.
So there was less evidence of them being sentient in terms of meeting strict criteria than what there is for insects now.
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